Self Storage Website Design — Yate Self Storage Case Study

An old static site rebuilt in WordPress with ten targeted landing pages — and taken to number one for its keywords.

An old static site and a hosting move

Yate Self Storage provided household and business storage from a site just outside Bristol. They came to us in 2014 through a developer we had employed, with an old static website that had been built years earlier and never really moved on.

The trigger for the rebuild was a hosting migration. The existing site could not sensibly be carried across as it stood, which turned a technical necessity into an opportunity to fix everything else at the same time.

We rebuilt the site in WordPress, working from the content of the old static site but restructuring it completely — and that restructure is what actually made the difference.

Ten landing pages, not one homepage

The old site had a handful of pages trying to cover everything. That is the standard failing of trade and service websites, and it is the reason so many of them sit on page three wondering why.

People do not search for self storage in the abstract. They search for household storage, business storage, student storage, document storage, furniture storage, caravan storage, archive storage — almost always with a location attached. Each of those is a different customer with a different reason and a different budget.

We wrote ten landing pages, one for each of those searches, sourced the content and the imagery, and had the client photograph their own yard and units so the site showed a real place rather than a stock warehouse. Each page targeted its own term rather than competing with the other nine.

That structure is the same principle we apply on every search optimisation project, and it is almost always where the ranking comes from.

Number one, and inundated

The site reached number one for the keywords the client had asked to rank for, and the enquiries followed. That is generally what happens when a local service business gets to the top of Google for the terms its customers actually use — the phone does not ring occasionally, it rings constantly.

It is worth being clear about why it worked, because it was not the design. It was ten pages of genuinely useful, properly targeted content where there had previously been three, on a platform the client could keep current, in a structure that matched how people search.

If you run a self storage, removals or warehousing business and the website is not producing enquiries, that is exactly the work. The Aztec Paving case study and the Sparks Transport case study are comparable projects.

Need a website that brings enquiries?

Tell me what you need and I will give you a fixed price. You deal with the person who builds it — not an account manager, not an offshore team.